Author overheard gossip through the Martha Vineyard's grapevine

Celebrity News

July 12, 2006|By GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY | GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY,TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES

The rich and famous islanders of Martha's Vineyard should lower their voices the next time they stop by Sunporch Books in Oak Bluffs. Little do they know that proprietor Holly Nadler has been collecting every dollop of gossip she has overheard.

Among the tales Nadler shares in her new book, Vineyard Confidential:

Bruce Willis reputedly hit on 137 waitresses during his Vineyard visits over the years. According to Nadler, he scored with precisely zero.

Woody Allen once faxed a list of requirements to a real estate agent who was supposed to show him properties. According to Nadler, the Woodman insisted the agent should remain silent unless spoken to. ("That doesn't sound like him," the director's flack told us.)

"Diane Sawyer is the most demanding of all our VIPs," a source at the Vineyard airport told Nadler. "She insists on being driven to the door [from her plane], rain or shine, even though it is a nine-second walk." ("Total baloney," Sawyer's rep tells us. "Diane always walks.")

John F. Kennedy Jr. would party like "a rock star" at his mother's Aquinnah manse when she was away. The Camelot heir would leave "wet towels on the floor, empty Champagne bottles strewn about, food smeared on furniture, discarded on carpets, even smushed into walls."

More pebbles from The Rock could be on the way. "I forgot a story about how a couple of guys threw [former Defense Secretary] Robert McNamara off a ferry," Nadler told New York Daily News' Deborah Newman. "So there's got to be a sequel!"

Surveillance

Newt Gingrich doesn't want to see Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Oval Office, but that didn't stop him from pitching a TV network on a sitcom based on a former president whose wife gets his old job. It would have "a Bill-Clinton-type first spouse bouncing around," the former House speaker tells Newsweek magazine. His proposed title: East Wing. ... Judith Giuliani giggled like a schoolgirl when her husband, Rudy, called to interrupt a Golf for Women magazine photo shoot in Grand Central Terminal. ... Gwyneth Paltrow may be under contract with Estee Lauder, but she doesn't mind consorting with the competition. She stopped by the party at Revlon billionaire Ron Perelman's East Hampton estate the weekend before last.